A New Angle on Saturn
You can read more on the Cassini site about this wonderful shot of Saturn from a […] Click to continue reading this post
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Author Archives: Clifford
When Worlds Collide, I
A most striking representative of an item from a completely different world than mine is the magazine Angeleno. It is among the most glossy of the glossy magazines I’ve ever seen. I’ve no really strong idea of who its intended readership is – this has been a mystery to me for so long, but by default it clearly can’t be someone like me (an academic), I decided, upon first seeing it. (You can read about the raison d’être of their parent company, Modern Luxury, here.) For some reason it arrives (for free although the cover price is $5.95) in my mailbox every month and I don’t know why. It is almost as though it’s a joke on the part of some prankster deity or other.
It has nevertheless done an excellent job of sneaking past my defenses. I don’t immediately throw it away when I receive it, and I find myself alternately annoyed and fascinated by it. Could this have been part of their plan all along?
It used to be that I was just plain annoyed when it would arrive – as much as 1/2 an inch thick, larger in square footage than most other magazines, highly airbrushed A-list star on the cover, and every page super glossy and shiny – and it would sit there for weeks until I’d find myself glancing inside it … just to confirm that I was justified in my righteous annoyance, you see. Sure enough, it would not disappoint. It has pieces devoted to ways of spending oodles of money on pointless stuff at extraordinary prices. There’s be the hot new treatments (“is Fraxel the new Botox?”). There’d be a gaudy diamond-encrusted PDA for your microscopic toy dog, that you […] Click to continue reading this post
You Can View Point of View
Well, the video of the Point of View event of a couple of weeks ago is now available. Click here for streaming media. There’s a problem, however. While my opening off-the-cuff remarks are utterly unimportant, and so it is not a big deal that the audio of that is poor, … Click to continue reading this post
Eclipse
Don’t forget the total lunar eclipse Saturday! It won’t be visible over here in the West, (except toward the end – see Amara’s remark), so unfortunately I won’t get to see all of it, but lots of you might, so you can tell us […] Click to continue reading this post
On Language in Science and Beyond
In Physics Today last month, Helen Quinn wrote rather well about the issue of language in science and in common (non-scientific) usage, with a focus on when the two collide. I recommend the article, which you can read here. There are cases in our own teaching where confusions arise, which … Click to continue reading this post
Show and Tell
Well, it is almost the last day of Black History Month and I am behind on answering the traditional emails I receive at this time of year. As I said last year (with a few modifications):
Pretty soon after February starts, the deluge of email I get every day gets enhanced a bit by emails from students from all over America. I become part of an assignment, you see. It seems that these students are instructed to find a black scientist and write something about them and do a presentation to their class about them1.
I’m always willing to help with this sort of thing (see the footnote for why), and so I usually send some links: to my personal webpage (here), or one of two profile pages for me at USC here and here (the latter by Katherine Yungmee Kim), a Daily Trojan news story by Diya Chacko here, or the departmental page on me (here), and a list of publications, and I hope that this is all of some use.
As to the standard “what is your date of birth?” question that is usually asked too, I don’t pass out that information over the web, but if you’re an interested student, you can email me for a bit more information if you wish, although I will not give out the exact date.
For a bit of biographical narrative, students can look on the “My Hero Project” […] Click to continue reading this post
Random Travel Matters
Well, I’m sorry if things have been a bit quiet around here for a bit. I’ve been very busy, and also eight hours out of sync with my usual cycle. Couple this to also being disconnected from the web in the second hotel I was staying in because of me being too cheap to pay the extortionate amount that they were asking for a connection (the other place had a free connection in certain public lounges, and luckily the signal leaked into my room enough to get me a good connection a lot of the time) and you get quite a bit of quiet.
I was in Dublin and London again. Dublin mainly on a work mission, London on the way back for non-work. I was having panel deliberations once again on a range of […] Click to continue reading this post
New Directions in Real Estate?
On NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).
Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
Light Seen Down Under?
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a few days*. It has since made it to rather high visibility in the news, I’m pleased to see, generating a lot of interesting discussion. The Australians (another nation not part of the original Kyoto agreement, notably) have pushed ahead on the issue of trying to legislatively encourage (shall we say) the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs over the more wasteful traditional incandescent bulbs.
You’ll recall my posting about this idea not long ago, in the context of proposed California legislation (so yes, I used the same images in the same way). Now, I’ll admit that I was thinking of that as a test case, and when things are ironed out into a workable legislation there one would imagine the model being rolled out to the rest of the world to adopt in their own fashion. I did not expect an entire country to adopt it so soon and at such a rate (they propose to stop sales of incandescents by 2010!).
We had a lot of discussion in that earlier thread about the pros and cons of this. Commenter IrrationalPoint (IP), for example, seems convinced that this represents a serious access problem for people who respond less favourably to the new lights. Such legislation is therefore discriminatory. My response to that was in several parts. The first is that I was not convinced that the cited flicker problems were really problems that referred to the new bulbs. They don’t work like the old nasty fluorescents we remember from years back, or that are still to be found in a lot of public spaces. Their flicker rate is up at tens of KHz, not the 60 Hz of old. IP (and one or two others) then suggested that the issues were with the spectrum. My response there was that the spectrum is quite a bit different from a lot fo the old lights, and where some discomfort might arise with the new ones, this is possibly only a problem for some if direct lighting from the light bulb is used. (I personally find direct light from incandescents pretty disturbing in a lot of cases too.) Why not use the bulbs in conjunction with a simple filter or other decorative fixture that can modify the light to your tastes?
But I am keeping an open mind on this. Perhaps I’m just wrong, and the whole idea of banning incandescents is unworkable and insensitive, but I am not convinced that work cannot be done to make sure that it works well for all concerned.
One of the biggest problems with the discussion is that nobody could point to good […] Click to continue reading this post
That Feeling
It is on the list of my top five all-time favourite feelings. But I know of no word for it in English that properly captures it. This is strange, since so much of our society relies on things that probably came about in accompaniment with this feeling. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sometimes it come on so strongly that it feels like a switch has been flicked inside my head, with an almost audible “click”, often accompanied by a smile, an oral exclamation, or even a moan. Why can I not think of a word for it? Perhaps my vocabulary is failing me, but if there is not such a word, then we should set about forging a new one, since it is so important.
What am I talking about? […] Click to continue reading this post
Pans. No Labyrinth
Yes, Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth is really wonderful. Go and see it!!
However, behold (click for larger):
I forgot to mention these earlier. This was my Christmas present to myself (with some contribution from my mum and sister – thanks!). I’ve been saving up for while to […] Click to continue reading this post
Phew, What a Scorcher!
I remember UK newspaper headlines like that from the 1980s when you’d have an unseasonably warm day. I wonder if they still have them? (The headlines, I mean, not unseasonably warm days…) Anyway, we had a day like that yesterday, with the high temperature in the mid 80s for a while. It came about all of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue.
So of course every other person in the city (and their dog, blades, bike, etc.,) went to the beach. (Or at least at times it felt like it was half the population…)
I wonder if the other half went to the mountains?
B Flat, but Stay Sharp
Bâ™, C, D, Eâ™, F, G, A, Bâ™ There’s something that resonates with me about the B flat scale. I don’t know why. I like the sound and feel of it. A lot of pieces of music are written in it (although I do not know if it is actually … Click to continue reading this post
POV about POV from my POV
Here are some shots from my point of view of last night’s speakers putting their points of view about the theme “Point of View”. The event was a reasonable success, in that people seemed quite engaged, and lots
Mars Attracts!
There’s a nice story about new photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for water having flowed on Mars. It is not really as dramatic as the photographs of late last year, but it is still an important piece of the puzzle overall (so do read about it), if harder to sell to the public as a “stop-the-press!” type of story. So here’s how three different news agencies tried to bring you in:
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The BBC: Rocks reveal Mars’ watery past
Not bad. The layering and colour gradations seen are is not direct evidence of water, of course. It could have been some other fluid flow, but…ok.
Next, we have: Click to continue reading this post
